Making the Most of Your LSAT Practice Tests

As we come down to the wire here, practice tests are increasingly important as an LSAT practice tool. They’re hugely useful for replicating the experience of a real test, and for exposing you to more and more questions.

But a practice test is perhaps most useful for helping you identify what you don’t know – and if you aren’t testing with that in mind, then you’re far from optimizing those PTs. How can you make sure you’re getting the most out of those grueling hours? By focusing on your errors.

You should be reviewing and reworking every single question you’re missing in PTs. That’s easy enough for LR, where you just have to review the stimulus, and most people do it. But don’t shortchange yourself on Games or Reading Comprehension either, even if it may be more time consuming.

For those of you with T14 ambitions, I’d strongly recommend you start keeping a log of all the questions you miss, either in drills or PTs. Include the test, section, and question number (obvz), but also note whether it’s LR or RC or LG. Even better: note whether your LR error is a Sufficient Question, or a Must Be True; identify on LG whether you missed an absolute or a conditional question. An immediate review of your errors is important, but I’d also recommend that you go back a few days later and check in to make sure that you’ll be set on that problem (and the concept it tests) when you see it in the future.

Additionally, keeping a log aggregates what might otherwise be scant and uninformative data points. You can’t infer much from the six LR questions you missed on your last PT, but after several, when you have, say, forty missed questions logged, it’s much easier to identify your problem areas.